Caradoc Evans was already on his way to becoming the self-styled "best-hated man in Wales" when he published his second collection of stories, Capel Sion, in 1916. The book was a companion piece to his 1915 debut, My People, and again focused on the "close-handedness" of rural Cardiganshire life as remembered from his boyhood.

Evans was a journalist in London at the time of publication, and there his work was well received; Mrs Asquith, wife of the prime minister, was said to have been "in raptures". But in Wales, his cast of characters - mostly brutal farmers and venal churchmen - precipitated civic and clerical outrage.

Throughout his career Evans seemed happy to cultivate his notoriety with a steady flow of equally contentious stories, novels and plays, as well as the occasional public excoriation of Welsh institutions such as the National Eisteddfod. When a Welsh journal accused him of writing "literature of the sewer" he took it as a compliment and agreed that west Wales was indeed a "moral sewer". But his intention was never to elicit shock for its own sake.

By the time of his death in 1945, Evans's standing was established; the habitual line in the reference books today is that he was the founding father of Anglo-Welsh literature. Indeed, such is his canonical status that encountering his vehemence and revulsion in this reissue of Capel Sion - which comes with two extra stories and a characteristically astute and informative introduction from John Harris (who has probably done more than anyone to reinforce Evans's position) - still takes the reader aback.

In "Redemption", a maid, Hannah Harelip, has been made pregnant by her farmer master. When this threatens to scupper his plans to marry someone else he tricks her into falling, elephant-trap style, into a concealed well. In "The Tree of Knowledge", the brother of a man who hanged himself from a tree reveals his true priorities when he instructs farm workers to cut him down but "be you careful you do not walk overmuch on the hay".

Evans was most exercised by what he saw as the choke-hold exerted by chapel ministers and elders over local communities. Chapel mores and language underpin all of Evans's generally very short stories. They are told in strange biblical cadences, often word-for-word translations from Welsh, Evans's first language. This is a woman praying over a dying beast: "Big Man, turn your think and don't destroy the cow Gwen."

Perhaps the strongest criticism levelled against Evans today is that his vision is too uniformly bleak, and that any social and economic analysis is swamped by his obsessive hatred of the clergy. Evans was certainly embittered by a childhood that ended, aged 14, when he was taken out of school to be apprenticed into drapery. But as Harris persuasively argues, the timing of publication is important. 1916 was to see the cataclysm of the Somme; Evans, through his journalism, had been critical of the widespread profiteering and exploitation of labour that took place under cover of the war effort.

"Though set in a pre-war period," writes Harris, "Capel Sion tones with a contemporary reality in its depiction of a warring unto death over land and money, the protagonists intimate enemies who babble of God and religion."

Contemporary Anglo-Welsh writers - people such as John Williams, Desmond Barry and Niall Griffiths - have been attracting attention for the grittiness and vigour of their work. It has been portrayed as somehow a new phenomenon, with Griffiths even being described as "the Welsh Irvine Welsh". So it is salutary to find that 80 years ago Evans's brutal social landscaping led his publishers to market him as the "Welsh Zola". And when one critic sought to damn James Joyce on publication of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the insult he reached for was "the Irish Caradoc Evans".